Hello, my name is Olivia, and I am battling an addiction. It is a new addiction, one I’m still feeling out. It will hopefully settle down to simply one of my “things,” a hobby, a pleasure, even a passion, but for now it remains dangerous, a little racy.
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I am woefully behind on posting, as today marks a week since the “Small is Beautiful” wine dinner with Alder of Vinography.com at Manresa, one of the world’s Top 50 Restaurants and a newly appointed San Francisco 4 star. By waiting this long to write, much of the work has actually been done for me: Alder has already written a wonderful description of the evening that is very much in line with my own thoughts. Rather than retreading the details here, I will add a few notes and some more general reflections on my interaction with the meal.
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I don’t imagine that the first words that would come to mind for anyone asked about my food preference would be “cheap eats!” I’ll just fess up: I tend to like things that just happen to be expensive. Big shock, I know. My food sensibility is usually best reflected in high quality ingredients and preparations served by nice people in pleasant, if not necessarily luxe, settings. That said, I learned early in life to appreciate a bargain. I even have an informal list of favorite eats in the Bay Area that offer good food at a great value. A few of them are even inexpensive. Many of these made it onto this year’s Bargain Bites roundup in the Chronicle.
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I’m not usually a huge fan of Robert Mondavi for the same reasons that I don’t hold any special affection for many mass market companies, but at least with volume come the benefits of a sizeable marketing budget. I haven’t typically been all that impressed with Mondavi’s output in that department either–though obviously it works–but when a site comes along that offers enough genuinely interesting and useful content to make the marketing message palatable and cast the product in a better light, you have to tip your hat.
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A wonderfully epicurean, world-traveler-extraodinaire friend moved to San Francisco a few weeks ago. She has visited dozens of times and has a good grasp of tourist things to do in SF, but it’s accomplishing the day-to-day errands that prove most challenging for the recently relocated, so I’ve decided to start an abbreviated guide to accomplishing life’s little chores in the Bay Area.
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In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee describes the quince as offering “a taste of what apples and pears might have been like in their primitive form.” (357) 
In raw form, it is gritty and astringent, with no obvious bearing on the cuisine at the lauded San Francisco of the same name. However, cooking domesticates the quince: stone cell walls break down with heat and the taste softens. When cooked slowly with sugar, the off-white flesh even transforms into a gem-like translucent ruby. With this in mind, the name begins to make sense: Chef Michael Tusk’s Quince is all about the revealing the innate wonder in each pristine ingredient.
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